How Satellite TV Sends And Recieves Signals

Scientific types may want to turn away. This is a very short, yet interesting, explanation of how does satellite TV work. Even though it has become very popular in the last few years, satellite TV has been around for a long time. The first satellite for TV was put into orbit in’62.

The old nine foot satellite dishes came with remote controls that were quickly lost. These satellites are still around because they have a forever life expectancy and work great. People who use them now just have the neighbors come over and help move the dish when they want to change satellites. They sit as a monument in most back yards. Big, grey, daunting. But, they have, and continue to, provide a superb picture on any television.

At that time, and for several years after, no one who owned the dishes really knew which satellites were plugged into which countries. So, you would move the dish until you picked up a country that looked good and watch it for a few days or months until you moved the dish again. Sometimes you landed on your own country, most times you didn’t. But, it was fun and all countries have unique television programs that aren’t seen in other countries.

So, as the popularity of satellite televisions grew they started shooting more satellites up that had transponders on them. They called these geostationary satellites because they are orbiting at the same speed as the earth so they aren’t really moving anymore than we are. This made reception easier to achieve and if you knew where a satellite was you could point the nine foot dish at the satellite and watch a different countries stuff. It was still pretty cool.

Well, nine foot dishes just have never really caught on as a yard ornament in cities and they wanted satellite television also. So, satellite providers came up with little’” dishes that could be put just about anywhere on a house with a clear southern exposure and started beaming programs from all of the satellites to the dishes. No more calling the neighbors to move the dish, just a little dish stuck on the side of a building that was easy to move and 500 or so channels to choose from.

Problem was that most city dwellers don’t have an unobstructed view of anything. So, the next advancement was found in spot beams. Spot beams provide the answer to many problems. The satellite shoots a signal to the spot beam. The spot beam shoots a signal to the dish. The dish shoots the signal to the receiver on the television.

The system runs on radio signals that are sent digitally encoded. The guys figured out that they could send more channels through the same bandwidth using this strategies. This is why over five hundred channels are available at any time, twenty-four hours a day. Improvements and advancements continue to be made that are making the dishes smaller and more powerful. It’s actually amazing how the whole system works.

So there you have it. The very unscientific answer to the question how does satellite TV work.

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